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Chrome 14 arrives with improved Lion support and NaCl

Google has released a new version of its Chrome Web browser. It brings a …

Google has announced the release of Chrome 14, a new version of its Web browser. The update brings some nice technical improvements under the hood and enables Native Client for end users.

Several key enhancements for Lion have been introduced in Chrome 14 on Mac OS X. Lion's new scrollbar style, which is fully supported in the new version, nicely complements Chrome's minimalist design. Chrome has also gained compatibility with Lion's full-creen functionality. It also offers a separate "presentation mode" that mimics the legacy fullscreen style.

One of the most significant technical additions in this release is support for the new Web Audio API specification, which is a draft-status standard proposal authored by Google through the W3C. It enables rich audio processing in Web applications—making it possible for games to mix sound sources in 3D space, for example. Google has published some compelling demos to illustrate its capabilities, including a WebGL pool game with spatially realistic sound effects.

Another major change under the hood in Chrome 14 is that Google has enabled its Native Client (NaCl) framework. NaCl allows native code supplied by third parties in the form of platform-neutral binaries to be executed securely in the browser. NaCl has been present but hidden behind a flag in previous versions of Chrome. The new version enables it by default, but it currently only works with content loaded from Google's Chrome Web Store. The company says that it intends to lift that restriction in the future.

NaCl opens the door for some intriguing capabilities (including the ability to natively run Vim in the browser), but it hasn't gained acceptance among other browser vendors. As we remarked when we looked at the Chrome 14 beta last month, NaCl will likely be important on Google's Chrome OS platform, but doesn't have a place in the standards-oriented Web ecosystem.